After teaching 35 years, I really evaluated what I was doing and how it worked with the current students. I had updated many of my class activities but was far from where I needed to be. Here I am two years later and here is the report on how I did on my beliefs.

VRG – Most days last year I greeted each student with a random card that assigned them a seat in a group of three. The greeting was valuable and the students familiarity with each other paid huge dividends. The collaboration as they were learning was also valuable. I will continue to do this.

VNPS – Immediately after I returned from TMC15 I started planning whiteboards on every available wall in my classroom. I also pushed my math colleagues to do the same. Most of the math classrooms in my high school now have whiteboards everywhere. I used VNPS on a regular basis the past two years. Students work together at the VNPS and the conversations are amazing. VNPS ARE A MUST IN EVERY MATH CLASSROOM!

Last year I implemented Standards Based Grading (SBG) in my Algebra 1 and Honors Algebra 2 classes. My grade reports went from meaningless to reporting strengths and weaknesses of my students. I also opened my assessments to retakes and the true purpose of what we are doing in our schools. If learning is our goal, we must give multiple opportunities to learn. SBG might seem like a big change, so you can call it Objective Based Grading and just change the names of your assessment to the objectives they are assessing. Instead of one grade, each of my assessments have 4-5 grades with objective names. Here is how each objective is scored on my assessments. SBG IS AN ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED CHANGE, IF YOU ARE NOT ALREADY DOING IT.

Desmos and Desmos Activities have changed how my students and I look at learning mathematics. The process of learning is so much more efficient when you use the right tools. As a Desmos Fellow, I learned how to build Desmos Activities that are purposeful and reach all levels of students. DESMOS HAS AND WILL CONTINUE TO CHANGE HOW MATHEMATICS IS STUDIED BY TEACHERS AND STUDENTS.

I would like to apologize to the over 3500 students that had to sit through their first day of the year listening to me read rules and procedures. I know by the end of the first day they couldn’t remember which rules went with which class and wanted to poke their eyes out. The past two years I made sure that I was doing activities the first week that helped students understand what learning looked and felt like. I made sure it was an activity that was math related and students were learning about each other and I was learning about them. My favorites are Noah’s Arc, The Taxman and Sum 31 Card Challenge. And, Name Tents from @saravdwerf are a must for the first week. These are ideas I got from various people at TMC and the Twitter community.

I also attended TMC16 and TMC17, which generated all kinds of other things I need to think about and implement when they are needed. All the ideas expressed here have kept me young and my classroom fresh. Thank you all that have contributed to these changes.

I am still working on journaling in my classroom. I am going to make this my #1TMCThing. I know it is a great thing, I just need to work out the details. My plan is to do this electronically with either Google Classroom or some other electronic form.

One more year is almost in the past and I want to reflect on what I have done differently and what/who changed my teaching profession for the better.

This was the third year for me using Twitter, the second year of TMC and the first year of being a Desmos Fellow. I bring that up because there were many things that shaped me as a math teacher over the years, but these are three things that are currently guiding me in my profession.

Twitter: I started teaching 36+ years ago in a small high school as the only math teacher and struggled to find mentors. The state of Montana has been constantly struggling to get enough teachers in the rural areas, and then supporting them with mentor programs because of the distance to other schools. Now I teach in a larger school with 12 great math teachers in the same hall. We still rely on innovative ideas from the Internet. My single biggest source of new ideas is my Twitter community. That community started with #mtbos and @tmathc. The amazing part of my teaching career, started trying to find someone locally to collaborate with and I have recently collaborated with people literally around the world via Twitter on math techniques and lessons.

Twitter Math Camp: Early in my Twitter life I discovered a group that was meeting during the summer to make connections with each other via Twitter and an annual meeting. I followed their tweets that first year and became determined that I would be at the next summer meeting, no matter what it took. I attended TMC15 with a colleague and brought home more ideas than I could carry. Besides attending morning sessions on Desmos, I brought home ideas about VNPS (vertical non-permanent surfaces) and VRG (visual random grouping) from the amazing Alex Overwijk @alexoverwijk. These two ideas changed the way that I taught. I implemented VNPS as soon as my classes started in the fall. Not only did it change how I taught, but the majority of my math colleagues in my building now also use VNPS on a regular basis. If you are not familiar with VNPS, research now and put it into practice ASAP. The amount of formative assessing I can do, and the student collaboration that takes place during VNPS is clearly superior to anything that I have ever done in my classroom. I now greet my students at the door and give them a random card to assign seats in groups of three. This is called VRG because students know two things, they are assigned randomly rather than some form of teacher manipulation and their partners are just for that day. I tried this mid-year last year and was not as successful. Starting at the beginning of the year, students haven’t already formed many opinions about their classmates and get to know a lot of student early in the year. I attended TMC16 and will be at TMC17!

Desmos: If you teach anything that involves graphing, you MUST use Desmos. Between the graphing tool for graphing and discovery, to the classroom activities that you can use, it will change the way you look at math and working in your classroom. If you haven’t seen Desmos or didn’t get the Desmos bug, go there NOW! desmos.com and/or teacher.desmos.com. I also have had the great fortune to be invited to be a part of an amazing group called the Desmos Fellowship. The great ideas just keep flowing from the creative Desmos Team and the fellowship group. Desmos gave me the opportunity to personally meet all these amazing people in November at the Desmos headquarters. These two groups are changing the way math is taught and how we look at math education.

Sub categories (but also important):

Backwards Brain Bicycle: Thanks to @saravdwerf and @msfierst for the inspiration to build a Backwards Brain Bicycle and use it in my school to demonstrate perseverance with numerous side lessons. Here is my story: Backwards Brain Bicycle

Name Tents: These are not your usual name tent and you MUST do this to start your next year. Once again with great influence from TMC and @saravdwerd my colleagues and I used Name tents during the first week, with amazing results. Click on the link above for more information.

Standards Based Grading: I actually use Objective Based Grading, but with the same philosophy. I used it in my Algebra 1 classes this past Fall and will incorporate it in my Honors Algebra 2 classes this Spring.

It has been a really great year and next year will surely be better because of the wonderful math communities that allow me to live in their world! Thank you!

It is that time of the summer when I start to think about changes I want to make in my classroom and class procedures. I am attending a #desmos conference and #tmc16 in a few days. That will be a great environment to generate ideas. I am also be attending these with colleagues that give me the incentive and desire to take me out of my comfort zone. My comfort zone includes doing the same things that I have done in the past. When I am taken out of my comfort zone, great things happen.

So off to Minneapolis Minnesota for the rejuvenation that I need and the ideas that will make the next school year the best year yet.

My school year ended on Friday and as I sit here Sunday night (when my teaching week usually begins) I am reflecting on my year.

I has been an interesting year. My “year” began last July at TMC15. I say that it started at TMC15 because that has shaped many of the things that I did this year. I was completely rejuvenated with TMC and the ideas generated there.

Twitter – What a wonder community and generator of ideas. So much food for thought and so many ideas, many of which I used in my classroom.

Desmos – I have always been a big fan of Desmos and attending TMC sessions last summer and having Eli Luberoff come to Montana to speak at our MCTM annual conference in October was amazing. I presented workshops on using Desmos in the classroom at the last three MCTM annual conferences and it is constantly changing for the better. This year Desmos Activity Builder was a great addition to my classroom

New textbook – This maybe wasn’t such a positive thing. I wanted to give the textbook a good shot, so I tried to use it the way the author intended. Then I spent a lot of time creating things to keep the students interested and energized. Now I know that I have some work to do to readjust for next year.

I tried Standards Based Grading (actually Objective Based Grading) and was pleased with it, but I need to refine my system.

I used Google Classroom several times this year and discovered its potential.

I did not give enough positive feedback to my students. This is a goal mine every year and I think I slipped a bit this year.

OK…to make improvements for next year.

I am attending TMC16 and MCubed (Montana version of TMC) this summer. I am co-presenting “5 Practices” at TMC and Desmos at MCubed. I am looking forward to getting more great ideas from both of them.

My colleagues and I will work this summer to put a better plan together to create thinkers and to make math more interesting and pertinent.

My daughter (also a math teacher) and I are going to build two “backward bicycles” to use in our respective schools. Thanks to Destin at @smartereveryday and Sara @saravdwerf . We really need to teach our students about learning and perseverance.

Over the past 35 years I have taken good activities and made them better multiple times. Sometimes the improvements have been because of past experiences and sometimes the improvements have been because of new tools.

This past week, I took a project that I have done with various grade levels and in various degrees of depth. It is a project that includes paper folding and exploring exponential growth and exponential decay. Most of the time it includes a Myth Busters video clip about folding paper a maximum number of times (link below).

This activity explores the exponential growth of the thickness of the paper as they fold it and the exponential decay of the area of the top sheet as they fold it.

This past week I created a Desmos Activity to complete the whole project and most of my Algebra 1 students completed it in a one hour period and felt lots of success. I didn’t show the video, but I handed them a sheet of paper to do the folding. Good old fashion manipulative married to technology. The Desmos Activity link is included below.

In the past some students got lost in the hand calculations and tedious graphing, and missed the AAHHH moment (on day 2 with the babysitter project they did graph on graph paper, which they needed to develop).

I followed up the next day with a babysitter project modified from a Maryland CCRG Algebra Task Project lesson (link below). I also included a document link with my modifications to make it a one day activity (link below).

This was an introduction to exponential functions with no pre-teaching. After two days I felt very confident that my students understood the difference between linear and exponential functions and could identify key features of each in a story, table and a graph. They also clarified slope and y-intercept for lines, and discovered exponential growth factor and exponential decay factor for exponential functions. They could also write an equation for exponential growth and decay. We will need some reinforcement on these next week.

Desmos has been amazing me since I first discovered it three years ago. It has progressed from my primary graphing tool, to using the Desmos Activity Builder as a classroom tool that I use more than once per week with my students. I feel like I have gotten pretty good with using the Activity Builder as a formative assessment tool. I do have a mobile Chromebook lab in my room so it is really easy for me to distribute them to my students. If the Chromebooks are already under the students’ desks, students are on the Desmos activity in less than a minute.

I am able to create a Desmos AB activity in 10-20 minutes that can assess previous skill level on yesterday’s topic or on a new concept that we are going to cover. Watching the Desmos activity on my computer, I can quickly adjust my lesson to cater to the needs of my class. And, I can look back at any previous activity to see what each student did on each screen to assess their level at that time.

One of the tricks to using Desmos AB is to create a way of student self-checking. If you build it correctly, students can enter answers and get instant feedback on their accuracy. There is a built in feature that you can allow students to see three other students’ responses, after they have typed their response. The trick is to know when to allow that option and when the students will abuse this information, by knowing they can get answers (may not be correct) after they “guess”.

Even though I feel I can create a very effect formative assessment tool, I am still not satisfied with my attempts to use Desmos AB to introduce new concepts. I believe they call those “rich tasks”. : ) I will continue to work on that, because this is such an amazing tool!